Gemma Cameron, our Principal Software Engineer speaks about what it’s like to work in Co-op Digital and Digital Engineering.

(Transcript) Gemma: I love the variety of projects that we have going on and all the people that are working on them. So we’ve got not just amazing engineers, we’ve also have got some really great product owners, delivery managers, really amazing BAs and the designers are just incredible and we’ve got all the user experience team.

We’ve got some great people working on really innovative cool projects and, you know, what comes out of it is actually doing something good.

We sponsor events, we attend events, so we were at the Manchester Digital Skills Festival not so long ago and that’s great meeting some of the new graduates and people are looking for work and getting to tell them about the story of what we do here, that we’re bringing brilliant people in who are really good at collaboration, who really care about software quality and you know we’re doing all the good things like test-driven development.

We’re building these great teams but we don’t expect everybody to know all the tools that we’re using or the languages that we’re using. So we have got some people who showing all these great people and behavioural qualities, but they’re not so good on Java and we’re giving them time and space and we’re coming up with a syllabus to give them that training.

The same with test-driven development and looking at all that quality. We have community of practice and we get together as a group of engineers and work out what our, sort of, level of quality should be. I also want to try and see if I can get involved in some of the projects from inception so actually working together with people and talking to them about what their needs are, going to have discovery phase and creating like little alphas that would be awesome because I’ve worked in a start ups before and I enjoyed doing that experience and it would be nice to do it for a more worthwhile cause.